Thousands of Irish homeowners who saw favourable mortgage terms taken from them can finally see light at the end of the tunnel

HELEN GROGAN was keen to make up for lost time when she bought her home in Palmerstown in Dublin in 2006. Having returned from the UK in her forties, she was a late arrival to the property boom. If she stuck with the scheduled repayments, she would be saddled with her mortgage from EBS building society until she was 70. By stepping up the payments, she had the chance to become debt-free earlier. The lower the rate of interest, the easier this would be.

It did not take long to find a cheaper mortgage. A newspaper ad from Permanent TSB caught her eye, promoting a tracker loan with an interest margin of 0.8 percentage points. While only marginally less than the one-point margin on her existing EBS tracker, Grogan reckoned she needed all the help she could get.